


A Lesson of Her Own Making

by audreyskdramablog



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Inspired by Salvage - MuffinLance, Katara fights her way to mastery, that's it that's the fic, with a bit of extra blood thrown in
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-19 05:48:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29621532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreyskdramablog/pseuds/audreyskdramablog
Summary: Katara steals four more lessons that week. Four more boys around her age who know the forms but don’t know the desperation of a true fight. They are bad at anticipating her movements and her decisions because Katara will never have the luxury of learning the way they did. She fightsdirty, not fair, and their pride doesn’t let them understand that they’re in over their heads until it’s too late.They leave her scrapes and bruises and cuts that fuel her healing sessions. When those are done, she goes back to their suite and resumes putting together a combat bending style from stolen pieces and her experience in the wider world.
Comments: 84
Kudos: 350





	A Lesson of Her Own Making

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MuffinLance](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MuffinLance/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Salvage](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21116591) by [MuffinLance](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MuffinLance/pseuds/MuffinLance). 



> I have been obsessed with [this post](https://muffinlance.tumblr.com/post/641775820926484480/oh-hey-i-just-realized-why-salvagekatara-had-to) about why Salvage!Katara had to fight her way to mastery ever since I saw it. Here’s my take on those missing scenes. Many thanks to [MuffinLance](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MuffinLance/pseuds/MuffinLance) for encouraging others to play in her sandbox and to [crazyloststar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crazyloststar/pseuds/Crazyloststar) for letting me pelt her with snippets while I was writing.

Sokka rushes down the stairs, straight past Pakku and toward her. Aang ignores the architecture entirely, calling up a gust of wind that carries him down the entire set in one leap.

“Are you okay?”

There’s fear in Aang’s voice, and the fury burning in Katara’s throat threatens to choke her. She yanks her attention away from Pakku’s retreating shoulders and to Aang—and there’s fear in his eyes, too.

“I’m fine,” she snarls, and it’s only half a lie.

True to his every smug word, Pakku didn’t actually _hurt_ her. He simply didn’t take her seriously until she forced him to, and even then, she couldn’t knock the contempt out of him despite throwing everything she knew at him.

He left her pinned, a casual display of his belief in her inferiority, and then turned his back on her again.

She tries again to yank her arms free, but they won’t budge any more than her legs will, and she doesn’t know how to _change_ ice like this into water without more range of motion than she currently has. If she had just a little more give around one of her wrists—

“You sure?” Sokka breaks left, circling around to poke anxiously at the ice spears that have her trapped. “Nothing skewered?”

She never imagined a move like this one, isn’t even sure she has the necessary kind of control to keep from killing someone with it.

“I’m fine,” she says again, but when Aang raises both hands to set her free, she snaps, “ _Don’t._ ”

Hurt is only a little better than fear, but Aang drops his hands and leaves her as she is.

Shame burns almost as hot as her fury. This, at least, is an apology that won’t be dragged out of her. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Aang says.

It’s not, but— “Let me try first.”

Aang nods and steps back, and the hurt gives way to a small, encouraging smile. Katara breathes in deep and lets out a much calmer _thanks._ Aang brightens just enough for her guilt to melt away.

“Hey, Aang,” Sokka says as he pops out from the right. He gives a significant look back the way they came. “See if you can help with the damage control.”

Katara glances toward the staircase with Aang. Pakku is there, which is only a surprise until Katara notices that Yue and Chief Arnook went down to meet him. The rest of the onlookers are up above on the landing, but the three of them are stranded there, halfway. The two men are deep in conversation, and Yue is off far enough to the side that neither of them notice when she makes a furtive _come here_ motion.

“Go, Aang,” Katara says, and Aang turns back to her. She swallows hard so she can get the words out through her fury. “You still need a master.”

“Katara—”

He’s going to refuse, again. If her pride were the only thing at stake—

“Aang,” she says, as gentle as she can manage because she knows Aang responds better to persuasion than to force. “Promise him you won’t teach me. Flatter him. Say whatever you need to so he’ll change his mind. Sokka, too.”

Chief Arnook and Pakku did a lot of blustering about heritage and culture in order to corner her into an apology. They didn’t get it, but with her defeat, Pakku’s pride might be soothed enough to relent, especially if he thinks—

Aang hesitates; Sokka gives her a long, measuring look. Then he nods once, slaps a hand on Aang’s shoulder, and spins him around so they can join the trio on the stairs.

—especially if he thinks this is all it will take to break her.

She didn’t cross the entire world to be turned away. The last time she saw scraps of her culture, she ripped them out of someone else’s hands and ran. If Pakku will not give her formal lessons, she will steal from him and every other master in the North as readily as she did the pirates.

Katara lowers her head as much as she can so her loose hair forms a barrier between her expression and the stairs. Then she closes her eyes and _thinks._

Ice to water to mist and back again. Water is flexible, malleable. Strong enough for seawalls and fine enough to be carried on a summer breeze. It carves canyons into bedrock and quenches raging fires, and she will not be denied.

She has her hands, her mind, and water in all its forms around her. That is all she had when she first recognized the rise and fall of the tides in her blood, and it is all the foundation she will ever need.

When she pulled the pillars down on Pakku’s head, she expected him to turn them into water, to let them splash to the ground around him. She hoped an attack from above would distract him so she could turn that water into a slippery layer of ice underfoot. An opening was all she needed. He turned the pillars to powder instead.

The ice stayed solid. Just—in smaller pieces, small enough that some of them fell down like snow.

Katara knows how to break ice. She does it all the time without meaning to; she did it minutes ago in the palace. And that same fury still burns inside her.

She bites her lip and doesn’t look up until she hears the crunch of footsteps in the snow.

Aang and Sokka stop in front of her. Aang looks guilty; Sokka watches her, curious.

“Did it work?” Katara asks.

“Yeah.” Aang sounds guilty. He drops his voice to a whisper. “I promise, as soon as we leave, I’ll teach you.”

She whispers, too. “How about we race instead?”

“What?”

Sokka gives her a look of fond exasperation. Then he takes two very large, very quick steps back, dragging Aang with him.

Katara clenches her fists and _wrenches_ —

And the spikes of ice burst into jagged pebbles. They cascade around her feet, an avalanche and lesson of her own making.

* * *

Yagoda waits for her at the top of the staircase. She is far more solemn than she was yesterday during class, and Katara braces herself for another enemy. But Yagoda’s _come with me_ is soft at the edges, so Katara waves Aang and Sokka off and follows Yagoda to the healing huts.

Yagoda does not take her to the large room where she conducts lessons. (She should be teaching now; where is everyone else?) She takes Katara back to a much smaller room meant for patients and sits down with her on the raised bed.

“I’m not hurt,” Katara insists. The look Yagoda gives Katara has her admitting, “Nothing more than a couple bruises. It’s no big deal. I’ll be fine.”

Yagoda smiles gently. “It was good of you to sit through class yesterday with the younger girls.”

“I wanted to learn,” Katara says. Because that _is_ true.

The Southern Water Tribe had healers, once. They will have one again when she returns, even if it means taking classes with children half her age.

Yagoda takes Katara’s right hand, turns it over so it faces palm up, and waits.

Katara tugs her sleeve down, revealing the bruises already starting to form.

“Be here an hour past sunrise.” Yagoda says as she draws water to her free hand. “We have years of practice to make up for.”

* * *

Katara’s next lesson offers himself up with a fragile ego while she waits for Yagoda to finish her midday meal. He’s lurking at the healing huts, waiting for his friend to be seen to after a mishap during waterbending practice. Katara doesn’t even remember his face, afterwards—what she remembers is the sneer in his voice when he says _so you do know your place after all._

Her water whip is as effective a lure on him as it was on Pakku, but he isn’t nearly as good. He is more deliberate in his actions, more careful in his movements. Where Pakku gave little room for her to truly _watch_ him as he flowed from one form into the next, this boy has to actively think about what each of his moves are before he does them.

When she gets back to her borrowed suite after her last healing session, she ensures the windows are covered and drags the furs on the floor to the edges of the room. Then she steps into the center.

Starting stance. Opening movement. Arm placement, shifting weight, follow through. That moment when he turned the wrong way because it was clearly the next move in the sequence rather than a response to how she was fighting.

Obviously, she doesn’t know how long this form is supposed to be or how it’s supposed to end, but that doesn’t matter. Katara closes her eyes and retraces her memory. She goes through the sequence again, slower. Again and again and again until it feels almost right.

Then she grabs the water from the wash basin and practices until it _is_ right.

* * *

Katara gets up long before sunrise and nearly makes it outside without waking anyone.

But Aang shifts, mumbles her name and a question that is almost coherent.

“Shhh, it’s all right, go back to sleep,” she tells him. “I’m just going fishing.”

* * *

She steals four more lessons that week. Four more boys around her age who know the forms but don’t know the desperation of a true fight. They are bad at anticipating her movements and her decisions because Katara will never have the luxury of learning the way they did. She fights _dirty_ , not fair, and their pride doesn’t let them understand that they’re in over their heads until it’s too late.

They leave her scrapes and bruises and cuts that fuel her healing sessions. When those are done, she goes back to their suite and resumes putting together a combat bending style from stolen pieces and her experience in the wider world.

* * *

To Sokka’s credit, even though he’s miserable once he comes back from his warrior training, he helps her put their suite to rights before he collapses face-first on the bedding and launches into an explanation for his broken heart.

Katara feels bad for him, but her fury is on Yue’s behalf.

“Hahn is just—” Sokka takes a moment to contemplate the best description and settles for “—the _worst._ And he’s got, like, this whole group who just fawn over him and his muscles and his engagement and Yue doesn’t even _like_ him but he’s too dumb to notice and he doesn’t even use boomerangs because he thinks—”

“Does Hahn have any waterbender friends?” Katara asks as innocently as she can manage, which isn’t much. She’s too angry that Yue likes Sokka but Yue’s feelings don’t matter to her father.

Sokka rolls over so he can stare at her. He takes a breath. “Should I ask?”

“Probably not.”

He squints. “Do you need backup?”

Katara smiles. “No.”

* * *

The first bone fracture Katara watches a healing session for is a break she hadn’t intended to give. She feels a little guilty until the boy catches her outside the healing huts during the meal break and tries to get revenge.

She lets him go only when she hears Yagoda calling for her.

* * *

Aang returns early one afternoon, while Katara is still practicing. She ends the form less gracefully than she wanted, but Aang doesn’t say anything about it.

It’s been awkward between them since Pakku caught Aang teaching her that first night. She leaves before he wakes up so she can search for any lessons to steal, and then they spend the day apart. Normally they don’t see each other again until dinner.

“Sangok was late to class today,” Aang says.

Katara wonders how long it took him to unfreeze himself from the wall. “Were you worried?” _Is he your friend?_

Aang wrinkles his nose. “Not really.”

Warmth blossoms in her chest, and she relaxes a little. “Help me straighten up?”

Aang helps her drag the furs back where they’re supposed to go. Once the work is done, he fidgets a few seconds and then blurts out, “I told Master Pakku about the exhibitions the Southern Air Temple used to host so benders of all different elements could show off their skills.”

Aang doesn’t talk often about his people. But he’s never mentioned anything like— _oh._

“I, uh,” he gets a bit pink and looks away for a second. “I asked Sokka to talk to Yue about it. About how much I’d been hoping to do something like that again, once we got here.”

* * *

Katara can’t help but be amused by how few men of the Northern Water Tribe can let taunts about their skill go unchallenged—when they come from a teenage girl. A few insults, a childishly small water whip, and boys her age and far older draw up as much water as they can manage from the canals to defend their pride.

When she starts challenging the near-masters, she takes her first losses since Pakku. But she walks—and sometimes limps—away with her hands overflowing with so many new techniques and ideas that she throws herself right back at them like the waves beating against the great Northern seawall.

And like the ocean, bit by bit, Katara chips pieces away and makes them part of herself.

* * *

(There are _so many_ waterbending masters in the North. Pakku isn’t the only teacher. But _none_ of them will take her as a student. Because Pakku said no or because they agree with him that girls shouldn’t learn how to fight or because she bruised their pride for showing up their students or showing up _them_ —whatever the reason, Katara has no remorse for pickpocketing techniques from all of them.)

* * *

As the Avatar’s trusted companions, Katara and Sokka are both invited to sit with Yue during the exhibition. They have a close, unobstructed view of the proceedings.

Yue may not have any choice about her marriage, but what choices she has, she embraces. She is an attentive host. She easily points out any waterbenders she thinks would be interesting to Katara.

(And as the next several weeks prove, Yue is also a very accurate host.)

* * *

“You do know you _don’t_ have to fight her, right?” Sokka asks, and his voice is loud, even for him. Loud enough that it means he wants her to overhear. Not because he’s trying to be cruel but because he’s trying to catch her attention.

So Katara pauses on the other side of the front door and listens.

“Like, you could just walk away instead of fighting her every time she points out that your bending sucks,” Sokka continues, in his deliberately flippant tone that has made her dunk him in the water more than once in their childhood. “At some point you should just accept that she’s better than you. You’d be less embarrassed if you just gave up, you know.”

“Teach your sister her place, or we will,” some new man—deep voice, scratchy—growls at him.

It was nice of Sokka to try to get them to dinner on time. Katara storms outside, her fury a flash flood in her wake.

Two men have Sokka not-quite cornered. They’re a matching set—an older man with graying hair who looks like the future version of the younger man she left dangling over a canal like an old icicle just as the sun came up. The younger flinches when he spots her, and the older’s double take melts into an immediate scowl.

Katara smiles at them, all teeth. “Awww, did you need your daddy to fight your battles for you?”

Unfortunately for him, they’re no better stopping her as a team than he was on his own. Sokka is a very enthusiastic spectator, though, and he doesn’t complain at all about being late for their meal.

* * *

“Your disgraceful behavior toward our _real_ waterbending students—” Pakku starts, and Katara doesn’t even try to hold back the fury that ignites her heart.

* * *

Katara heals herself under Yagoda’s watchful eye. The blood will be more difficult to get out her clothes, but she can do that back at their suite. She’ll need to change anyway and spend some time mending. It’s been a while since she’s done that, so she might as well make an evening of it.

Once Katara finishes, Yagoda brings her a bowl of seaweed broth that they normally reserve for patients who require more than one healing session. Katara is briefly tempted to reject it, but she can tell without standing that her knees are still watery. How much is from the aftermath of adrenaline and how much is from the prolonged concentration and delicate patience needed to fix a hand, she doesn’t know.

(Pakku didn’t make the same promise this time.)

“When Chief Arnook was a young man,” Yagoda says after Katara has finished the broth, “and still new to his role, several of the healers petitioned him.”

Yagoda holds out her hand; Katara places her newly healed hand in Yagoda’s gentle grip. She breathes evenly and watches as Yagoda calls forth water and examines Katara’s work.

“We wanted to establish criteria for mastery in healing. We wanted to confer the title to the women who knew everything we had to offer of the healing arts. A title they could carry with pride because they had earned it. Surely knowing how to save a life was worthy of that respect.”

Katara looks up at Yagoda. The woman’s gaze is on Katara’s hand, and the glow of her bending casts blue-green light across her face. She looks—Katara doesn’t know of just one word that can capture the faded anger, the silent exhaustion, or old resignation all at once. But it makes her heart ache in a way that threatens tears instead of shouting.

“The men were opposed, and Chief Arnook wanted their support. He was young, and the elders were doubtful about how well he could rule.” The light fades, and Yagoda lowers Katara’s hand until she can take it in both of hers. She looks up then and gives Katara a very small smile. “I can’t grant you a title, but I will teach you everything.”

* * *

The masters of the North do not acknowledge her; none of them stop fighting her, either, and that’s far more important. They could have denied her what she wanted if only they refused to fight her, but their pride is worth more to them than actually keeping her from her goal. They probably think she’s just being childish, petty, refusing to accept her very first loss. Yet they line up to be her lessons, even as they refuse to be her teachers.

Katara counts her days, her weeks, at the North Pole by the fights she finishes, by the techniques she steals, by the injuries she heals. She hurls herself against the masters of the North and tears knowledge out of their hands.

Her plan to goad Pakku into a third fight is interrupted when black snow begins falling. Katara is not the only person who sprints for the palace as the giant drums sound a warning. But she’s one of the first because she’s seen this before, and she knows exactly what it means.

She is out of time to study—they all are. It is time for the only Northern test that matters, and Katara will not fail it.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me at [tumblr](http://audreyskdramablog.tumblr.com/) & [twitter](https://twitter.com/audreyskdrama) if you like.


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